But greater control over where and how people work won’t necessarily translate into more free time. The study is based on interviews with leading futurists, technology specialists and workplace experts.
17 June 2005
Office of the future 2020
The future office will be increasingly mobile, with technology enabling employees to perform their jobs from virtually anywhere, according to Office of the Future: 2020, a research study recently released by OfficeTeam.
17 June 2005
Covering Italy
Italy’s urban vision is not what you think.
16 June 2005
Mediterranean Social Forum in Barcelona
The Mediterranean Social Forum opens today in Barcelona. The Spanish city hosts some 280 events, including conferences, seminars, workshops, devoted to the promotion of a public space for communication within the Mediterranean coasts.
Since its creation the Forum has opened up new horizons of discussion, incorporating issues such as education, arts, and the use and spread of technologies.
16 June 2005
NextD – NextDesign Leadership Institute
NextDesign Leadership Institute aims at helping design educators and practicing professionals meet the challenges of cross-disciplinary design and innovation leadership.
The latest issue of their journal addresses the role of design journalism in creating the future of design.
The ‘One Planet Living’ concept is aimed at building flagship sustainable communities around the world, including one in London’s Thames Gateway. The community is intended to be built within easy reach of the capital and will be the first zero-carbon, zero-waste community in the UK, offering an unrivalled quality of life at affordable prices.
Raid on Deerfield set out to do with a virtual exhibit that which would be almost impossible in a conventional museum setting: to simultaneously communicate five different cultural perspectives of the same historical event in a comprehensible manner.Read full story
Password is the name of the quarterly magazine of Philips Research. The latest issue is devoted to ambient intelligence and experience design and is now available online.
See also this interview with Emile Aarts, vice-president of Philips Research on ambient intelligence and the experience economy.
Only a fifth of big corporations have formal crisis-management plans. In the phrase of the sociologist Neil Weinstein, we are “unrealistic optimists” and tend to have trouble taking seriously those events with a low probability but a high cost. In other words, the very qualities that help people get ahead are the ones that make them ill-suited for managing crises.
Rey Ramsey’s mission of social change starts with the home and leads to the Web.
13 June 2005
The power of design [Fast Company]
The June 2005 issue of Fast Company is entirely devoted to the design. Click on the title of this post to get a full overview or read one of the selected features below.
- Strategy by design (IDEO)
- The power of design
- What P&G knows about the power of design
- The case for design (Steelcase)
- Strategy by design (IDEO)
- The power of design
- What P&G knows about the power of design
- The case for design (Steelcase)
[...] There is a certain correspondence between Microsoft’s research agenda and the work of the old-time anthropologists, many of whom were funded by colonial governments that needed to understand their native subjects in order to rule them more effectively. The modern version of this knowledge-power dynamic is Microsoft, a multinational technology colossus that hires anthropologists who study the natives in order to sell them more software. [...]
13 June 2005
Anthropology at Intel [U.S. News & World Report]
At Intel, which wasn’t used to having a direct relationship with its end users, the challenges for an anthropologist were not simple.
12 June 2005
The Future of Work blog
The official blog for the Future of Work Community, a membership organisation of HR, IT and facilities professionals.
12 June 2005
Critisising “The World is Flat”
Thomas Friedman’s influential book The World is Flat has been strongly critisised for its bias, simplicity and sloppiness:
- The Daily Telegraph (Robert Hanks)
- The Daily Telegraph (Noel Malcolm)
- The Economist
- The Guardian
- The Hindu
- The Independent
- The Nation
- The New Statesman
- The New York Times
- San Francisco Chronicle
- The Washington Post
- The Daily Telegraph (Robert Hanks)
- The Daily Telegraph (Noel Malcolm)
- The Economist
- The Guardian
- The Hindu
- The Independent
- The Nation
- The New Statesman
- The New York Times
- San Francisco Chronicle
- The Washington Post
12 June 2005
Sun Microsystems “Participation Age” event at U.N.
The Participation Age is all about access, built on a model of networked human beings who share, interact, and solve problems, via telephone, internet, and a myriad of other ways of connecting. Their participation creates ideas, information, opportunities, and value-social and economic-everywhere on the network.
The discussion, that was organised by Sun Microsystems and took place at the United Nations on June 6, was moderated by David Kirkpatrick, Senior Editor of Internet and Technology at Fortune Magazine. He was joined by:
- John Gage, chief researcher at Sun Microsystems and member of the United Nations Information and Communications Technology Taskforce
- Dr. Djibril Diallo, chair of the United Nations series of youth leadership summits
- Justin Shaffer, VP and Chief Architect for Major League Baseball Advanced Media L.P.
- Andrew Zolli, technologist and futurist-in-residence at National Public Radio and National Geographic
- Chris Anderson, Founder of TED
The event is available in audiocast (Real Player) and as a transcript (PDF, 132 kb, 47pp).
See also this interview with Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, on the same topic.
12 June 2005
When the consumer is in control [BBC]
The people who make films, TV and music are trying to work out how to survive in a digital era where the consumer is in control.
This was the predominant theme at a conference on the future of digital content held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London earlier this week.
11 June 2005
Milan is the most wired-up city of Europe [ANSA]
The city of Milan is the most wired-up city in Europe, but also Barcelona is very high up in the list, a survey carried out by Milan Chamber of Commerce shows.
11 June 2005
Frontline online
Frontline is the name of America’s best investigative journalism TV programme. It is produced by PBS and fifty of its in-depth reports can now be viewed in streaming video.
(Scrolling over the title brings up a short summary, clicking on it gives you even more information).
With more than 1 billion cellphones in circulation around the world, the questions of how, when and why people use them have turned from matters of curiosity and conversation into serious subjects of academic research.
10 June 2005
Technology that imitates nature [The Economist]
Biomimetics: Engineers are increasingly taking a leaf out of nature’s book when looking for solutions to design problems.